


Everything will never be okay

by middlemarch



Category: Birds of Prey (And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) (2020), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Mercy Street (TV)
Genre: Angst, Convent, Conversations, Crossover, F/M, Gen, Italy, Jewish Character, Pizza, Rabbis, Romance, Superheroes, not for purists
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-21
Updated: 2020-12-21
Packaged: 2021-03-11 00:21:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 571
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28216134
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/middlemarch/pseuds/middlemarch
Summary: She was drawn to Steve; he reminded her of herself a long, long time ago. She was never quite sure when she spoke to him who it was she hoped would answer.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes & Steve Rogers, Jedediah "Jed" Foster/Mary Phinney, Pepper Potts/Tony Stark
Comments: 2
Kudos: 2
Collections: Mercy Street Crossover Advent Silver and AU





	Everything will never be okay

“Tony said you’d be like this,” Helena said. Steve knew her as Helena, so she thought of herself that way when she spoke to him. She didn’t think of herself with a specific name when she talked to Tony or Bruce or Natasha, but everyone handled Steve with kid gloves and she was curious to see what happened if she started that way. With the gloves on. And then when she slowly, deliberately took them off.

“Like what?” Steve said. She kept herself from actually rolling her eyes, like the teenager she’d never been allowed to be between the trauma and Italy and the nuns. Sister Isabella had been kind but Sister Brigida had been a menace, dagger-eyed, her tongue as fierce as any arrow. Her favorite. She’d said the rosary in a Sicilian-inflected Italian and had the Sight. 

“Innocent,” Helena said. Helena was a name that meant light and she meant darkness; she had taken the name Maria when they’d sent her to the convent, because it meant bitter and she was young enough to think it made sense to claim openly what was hers. That to shoot an arrow without a blind was more virtuous. Steve probably still thought that. 

“I’m no innocent,” he said, his blond hair gleaming, glossy as a golden eagle’s feathers. If she shot him in the eye, that blue turned crimson, the gold would be the same, even when he fell to the ground. Deaf to Bucky’s screams, to Natasha’s. To Tony’s endless, welcoming grief.

“No, of course not,” she said dryly. “What the hell does Tony know?”

There was a pause. A beat. That man she’d slept with in Mantua, Jedediah Solomon ben Abraham, he would have laughed, very softly, if she had told him about the young hero and the broken man. How the hero thought a shield was enough, how you could always go home. He’d had dark curls, dark eyes, Jedediah Solomon, and a way of looking into the night as if light might be found in it as well as oblivion, as if oblivion might be nearly as good as light, if you had not found the text you sought. His hands had been very deft, bringing her to climax, and he had let her ride him until the moon was low in the sky. Then he kissed her throat and whispered David’s Psalms into her ear, her mouth as he claimed her.

She had never returned to Mantua.

“He’s cynical, Tony,” Steve said. “He’s given up on people. On their better angels. He expects the least of them—and he finds that.”

Helena knew a little of what Tony did. Of mothers lost and fathers and deceit. Betrayal. Of finding comfort and then letting it go. Pepper stayed but there was a distance there—she was so pretty, like a piece of crystal and twice as sharp. Jedediah Solomon had prayed, washing himself in a basin of water at dawn. Winding his tefillin while he looked at her in their bed, the sheet at her waist, her breasts bare; any concealment was beyond them both. She’d never tried to find him. She knew he could not answer.

“Fine,” she said. It wasn’t and it wouldn’t be; at some level, even Steve knew that. “Let’s watch the game. And then we can argue about whether to call it football. And whether Hawaiian pizza is an abomination or merely exploitation.”

**Author's Note:**

> Jedidiah Solomon ben Abraham Norzi (1560–1626) (Hebrew: ידידיה נורצי, Yedidya Nortzi) was a Rabbi and exegete, best known for his work Minchat Shai. Born at Mantua, he studied under Moses Cases, and received his rabbinical ordination in 1585. Toward the beginning of the 17th century he was elected co-rabbi of Mantua, a position which he held until his death.
> 
> Pretty sure the title of this is a line of Tony's.


End file.
